Ms. Suerie Moon :: Sustainability Science Program :: Center for International Development

Sustainability Science Program

Ms. Suerie Moon
Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
502 Rubenstein Building
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Tel: (1) 617-496-0739
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: suerie_moon "at" ksgphd.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: 2008-9 Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science

Suerie Moon is a Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Center for International Development and a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Her research focuses on international relations and global governance, specifically North/South relations, the evolution of international norms, global civil society networks, global health and human rights. She also works on analyzing the relationship between access to medicines, innovation and intellectual property rights policies, and the implications for equity in public health in the developing world. Moon is currently a contributor to the Institutional Innovations for Linking Knowledge with Action in Global Health Project funded by the KSG Dean's Acting in Time initiative. The project takes as a case study the historical and contemporary international responses to malaria, in order to draw broader conclusions about effective global health institutional arrangements with applicability to other health areas. She is a recipient of the Norberg-Bohm Fellowship (2007) and two Research Fund grants from the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations (2007, 2008), which have enabled her to begin field research in China, Switzerland and Thailand. She is also a research assistant on a project examining the negotiation of accountability relationships between civil society, national governments and international financial institutions in six developing countries. Prior to coming to Harvard, she was a campaigner, researcher, and writer for the Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) international Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, where she focused on intellectual property rights, equity prices for medicines, and research and development into 'neglected diseases.' She received a Masters in Public Affairs with Distinction from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and graduated cum laude with a BA in history from Yale University.

Providing Global Public Goods: Normative Evolution and the Politics of Medical R&D: An important challenge in sustainability science is to understand how the framing of development problems shifts and how norms evolve. This is increasingly true at the global level, where many sustainability problems must be addressed. This project will explore the processes through which global norms regarding public health have shifted, specifically in the issue area of research and development (R&D) and access to new medicines, vaccines and other health tools. The past several decades have witnessed a normative evolution regarding who should pay for and who should benefit from medical R&D, with a steady shift away from a national and towards a global framing of this issue. In the past decade, the mobilization of people living with HIV/AIDS and civil society organizations has played a critical role in pushing forward this evolution. Today, the products of medical R&D are increasingly (albeit slowly) understood as global public goods, rather than as private commodities, such that both the global poor and rich should have access to them. Accordingly, notions regarding how R&D ought to be financed are increasingly including public and philanthropic financing from both low- and high-income countries, in addition to market mechanisms. This normative shift has already had impacts on public policies, private sector behavior, and the structures of global health institutions targeted toward infectiousdiseases; whether this shift will ultimately extend to all health conditions remains to be seen, but understanding the evolution thus far may help to make sense of current and future trends in the way medical R&D is organized, funded and shared.